Holy Land

ARTICLES ABOUT HOLY LAND BY DATE - PAGE 5

The Pale of Settlement By Margot Singer University of Georgia Press, 213 pages, $24.95 Refresh, Refresh By Benjamin Percy Graywolf, 249 pages, $15 paper Collections of linked short stories have proliferated rapidly in recent years. There will never be as many of them as collections of disparate tales. But they're piling up, and some of them, such as Elizabeth MacKenzie's "Stop That Girl" of a few years back, remind us of the excellence of the model -- Sherwood Anderson's Midwest masterpiece "Winesburg, Ohio" -- and the possibilities for the form among contemporary fiction writers.

The promised land of the world's Rastafarians can be found along a narrow highway in Ethiopia's ancient Rift Valley, a landscape of scattered trees with boles the size of houses and fields of grain that shimmer in the sunlight like a bronze haze. The setting is beautiful -- Edenic even. But as with the original Eden, it isn't without its pitfalls. "We've been waiting a long, long time to become Ethiopians," said Desmond Martin, a Jamaican pioneer who settled here more than 30 years ago on land donated by Emperor Haile Selassie.

The ballgame began with the national anthem: the Israeli one, sung by an aspiring singer on the pitcher's mound. Israeli television announcers, broadcasting live on the national sports channel, juggled Hebrew translations of baseball lingo with the English terms, explaining the intricacies of the sport to the uninitiated. And everywhere around the field there was talk of a "historic" moment. The first professional baseball game in the Holy Land "in 5,000 years." The Israel Baseball League had its opening game Sunday evening to kick off a summer season with 120 players, including about a dozen Israelis, from eight countries.

An Israeli archeologist has found the tomb of King Herod, the legendary builder of ancient Jerusalem and the Holy Land, Hebrew University said late Monday. The tomb is at a site called Herodium, a flattened hilltop in the Judean Desert, clearly visible from southern Jerusalem. Herod built a palace on the hill, and researchers discovered his burial site there, the university said.

An Israeli archeologist has found the tomb of King Herod, the legendary builder of ancient Jerusalem and the Holy Land, Hebrew University reported Monday. The tomb is at a site called Herodium, a flattened hilltop in the Judean Desert, clearly visible from southern Jerusalem. Herod built a palace on the hill, and researchers discovered his burial site there. The find was made by Ehud Netzer, a Hebrew University professor who has worked at Herodium since 1972. Herod became the ruler of the Holy Land under the Romans about 74 B.C. The wall he built around the Old City of Jerusalem still stands, and he also ordered big construction projects such as the hilltop fortress of Masada.

From Moscow to Washington, Rome to Jerusalem, Christians of the Orthodox and Western faiths celebrated Easter on Sunday, prayed for a better future and relished their ancient rituals. The alignment of the two faiths' Easter calendars, based on equinox and moon phases, occurs every few years, and this year's overlap made the narrow streets in the Holy Land especially crowded. In the Pacific's predominantly Christian Solomon Islands, struggling with tsunami losses, villagers descended from the hills to celebrate Easter.

You know what would make a Good Friday great? Peace in the Mideast. And it's Passover, yet there seems to be no escape from the stalemate between the Israelis and Palestinians, which impacts everyone from the U.S. to the Holy Land. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice recently returned from the Mideast, and she's doing her part to bring the two sides together. While diplomats in finely tailored suits argue about borders, broken promises and who did what to whom, maybe Rice could get everyone's attention with a well-executed line.

By Lindy Scott, Professor of Latin American Studies, Wheaton College | January 16, 2007

Terrorism is the plague of our generation. Although our government officials are spending billions of our tax dollars per week to fight terrorism, the threat is not declining. Something is drastically wrong. Our leaders do not seem to understand terrorism. A war on terrorism cannot be waged as a traditional war. Traditional wars have been fought by political entities with stated objectives following a specific declaration of hostility. It is assumed that these political groups have control over their armed forces and can bring an end to the fighting if peace talks lead to an armistice.

Pope Benedict XVI called on the world's nations to champion peace and human rights and urged people to repudiate war and violence in his New Year's address Monday. The pontiff, who wished tens of thousands of pilgrims crowded into St. Peter's Square "peace and well-being" in 2007, prayed for a "sacred respect for every person and the firm repudiation of war and violence. "Today, there is a lot of talk about human rights, but often it is forgotten that these need a stable foundation, not a relative one, not one subject to opinion," the pope said during his blessing to the faithful.

The archbishop of Canterbury, Rowan Williams, said Friday during a pilgrimage to Bethlehem that the Israeli-built wall around the traditional site of Jesus' birth symbolized what was "deeply wrong in the human heart," a British news agency reported. Williams, the Anglican spiritual leader, is on a four-day trip to the Holy Land along with other British church leaders. After six years of Israeli-Palestinian fighting, the town is now walled in by Israel's West Bank separation barrier.